The Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder', Politics, and the Jews in 1840
Cambridge University Press
Edition: 1st edn, 1/13/1997
EAN 9780521482462, ISBN10: 0521482461
Hardcover, 512 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
In February 1840, an Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Many Jews in that city were charged with ritual murder and tortured until they confessed. The case turned into a cause célèbre across much of the western world, even becoming a factor in the major diplomatic conflicts of the period, and produced an explosion of polemics, fantastic theories, and strange projects. The religious revival and romanticism of the period provided fertile soil for every speculation. This 1997 book, the first since 1840 to analyse the affair, assesses the Damascus affair as a factor in European and Jewish politics of the time, as a chapter in Jewish history and historiography, and as the stuff of radically conflicting myths - myths which eventually fed into the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel.
Preface
1. Introduction
Part I. The Dynamics of Ritual Murder
2. Ritual murder
official documents
3. The mechanics and motivations of the case
4. Beyond Damascus
early reactions
5. The consuls divide
Part II. In Search of Support
6. The press, the politicians, and the Jews
7. Restoring the balance
the Middle East
8. Political polarization and the genesis of the mission to the East
Part III. 1840 - Perceptions, Polemics, Prophecies
9. The crisis
Jewish perceptions
10. The religious polemics
11. Christian Millennialists, Jewish Messianists, and Lord Palmerston
12. Jewish nationalism in embryo
Part IV. Last Things
13. Alexandria on the eve of war
14. The final lap
public opinion in Europe
15. In the wake of the war
the return to routine
Part V. In Retrospect
16. Between historiography and myth
the two primary versions of the affair
17. Conclusion.